


These Sweet Instincts

by Dredfulhapiness



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, season 12 rewrite
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-25 15:40:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30091332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dredfulhapiness/pseuds/Dredfulhapiness
Summary: As it went, he gave her a ride home and they sang along to Babe I’m Gonna Leave You and when she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek when they pulled up in front of her house, she unknowingly sealed her own fate. Mary Winchester dies in fire eleven years later. So it goes.She comes back different— a different time, a different home, a different face on her children. First a ghost, then a person; always a shadow.Suddenly there are three different lives Mary has to assemble, which is much harder to do than it was to live three different lives. There aren’t rules for this, no well-construed instruction manual that tells her which Mary she’s supposed to be at any given time.Or, I'm fixing Mary
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester & Mary Winchester & Sam Winchester, Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester
Comments: 17
Kudos: 81





	These Sweet Instincts

Mary Campbell is born under the Archer. If she bothered looking into that new-age crap, she’d probably buy in. 

She grows into the sign, first with toys, then a crossbow. Then, later, a wedding ring and a rearview. She’s headstrong, and loud, and she promises, to no one in particular, that she’s going to get out. 

She’s always known about the things that go bump in the night. There’s no big revelation, no family meeting to tell her about the horrors of the world. It’s a job, and it’s secret, and when she gets strong enough to grip something without dropping it she’ll be a part of it, too. 

Fact: Samuel Campbell kills vampires, and werewolves, and a host of other nightmarish things. 

Fact: He taught his daughter to wield a knife before a gun, and for that small mercy she named her second born son after him. 

She becomes an expert on rules at a young age. Which ones to follow, which ones to break. Who to be at any given moment.

Most hunters have racked up a laundry list of criminal charges— all minor league stuff, if they’re lucky, prison time if they aren’t. The Campbells don’t, they have appearances to keep up, pies to drop off to neighbors on Sunday mornings. Mary has soccer practice, and homework, and to sharpen the knives in her go-bag after every hunt.

From the outside perspective, Samuel owned no more rifles than are necessary for hunting season. He taught his daughter to shoot only because he had no son. 

She was a little free-spirited, sure— bell bottoms and leather jackets, and once she was caught by Mrs. Sandoval on the back of Jimmy Wright’s motorcycle— but it was the seventies; a teenager who didn’t act out a bit was more suspicious than one who ended up with a some road rash. 

When she meets John, there are new rules to follow. Don’t be stronger than him, don’t quote war novels more than him, when he takes you shooting, miss the target so he doesn’t realize you’re better than him. 

She meets him, a Marine fresh from Vietnam, at a showing of  _ Slaughterhouse-5.  _ He doesn’t get the message of the movie, that nags at her when they discuss it over coffee. He’s seen war needlessly, been in the trenches of it, but he came out feeling like a hero instead of a victim or a villain. 

Being raised with it, with the blood and gore and the claustrophobia of it all, is different than being raised with grand notions of it. 

In a world where Heaven minded its own angelic business, there wouldn’t have been a second date. 

As it went, he gave her a ride home and they sang along to _Babe I’m Gonna Leave You_ and when she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek when they pulled up in front of her house, she unknowingly sealed her own fate. Mary Winchester dies in fire eleven years later. So it goes. 

She comes back different— a different time, a different home, a different face on her children. First a ghost, then a person; always a shadow. 

Suddenly there are three different lives Mary has to assemble, which is much harder to do than it was to  _ live _ three different lives. There aren’t  _ rules  _ for this, no well-construed instruction manual that tells her which Mary she’s supposed to be at any given time. 

Mary Campbell knows her way around a gun. She learned to drive on her way back from a rugaru hunt while she reeked of smoke and burnt flesh. She dated men her father didn’t like, smoked pot under the school bleachers. She had calloused hands, and scraped knees, and a laugh like a hyena— too raucous. She listened to music her mother called noise. Every night she prayed to Something and hoped that Something was forgiving. She called it God, even if that wasn’t the right word. 

Mary Winchester was a wife and a mother. She had delicate hands, and soft hair, and she never complained when her husband came home from work already drunk. She listened to music, loud. She let her husband wrap his leather jacket around her shoulders. Mary Winchester couldn’t win in a fight, or fire a gun, and she was great with in-laws. She didn’t believe in monsters. 

Then there was Mother Mary, pious and fictional, memorialized in photo paper and journal entries. She reads them all, and she doesn’t recognize herself. Mother Mary cooks, apparently. She doesn’t drink anything harder than wine. She wore a white nightgown until she died, and she wore it after, too. She cut crusts off of sandwiches, and changed diapers, and she made promises she didn’t necessarily mean to keep— even if they did come to fruition. Angels were watching, Mother Mary was right about that. 

She’s not sure who she is now, which of the boxes she’s supposed to check off, which rules she’s supposed to be following. There’s a gun in her waistband, but she’s staring at her children. They aren’t children, they’re strangers. They’re driving her car, and listening to her music, and killing monsters. They have pictures of her in their rooms. They want her to be Mother Mary, but she never was Mother Mary, and she isn’t sure how to apologize for that.

She does what she can, though, and this is what Mary  _ can _ do; this is part of being a mother: 

She reaches out and straightens Sam’s already straight collar, fusses over his hair and rests her hand on his cheek for just a second. 

Sam nods, clears his throat. “So, how do I look?” 

He looks grown up. She’d missed the awkward years, when kids walk around with zits and oversized shirts untucked. His button up is covered in thin blue stripes. He’s wearing dress pants. His hair’s a little long, a little unruly, but there’s nothing she can do to fix that, and commenting on it seems out of her lane. 

Maybe a mother who’d raised her children could say something about it, but there’s no denying that her own role falls outside the scope of nagging. So, instead, she fiddles with the hair part until he gently pushes her hand away with a thin-lipped smile and a breathy laugh. 

“I think it’s good, Mom,” He says. The word still sounds clunky coming out of his mouth. 

“Right,” She says. “Sorry.” 

They pull apart and stare at each other. When the silence goes on for too long, Sam flexes his shoulders and levels Mary with a hopeful look. “Do, uh... You got any advice for me?” 

She blinks. “For dating?” 

He nods, and she almost laughs. Almost. Her own romantic venture had been scripted. Thanks to the heavens, anything John had done would have won her over. She’s still trying to come to terms with that.

But dating advice— that’s her job, right? 

She bites her lip and tries to parse through the things she’d actually liked and the things Cupid’s arrow had convinced her to like. 

(Muscle cars? The smell of grease? Bicep scars? Sharing a bottle of tequila?)

She can’t trust her own judgement, not really, so she thinks about movies instead. 

“Well, uh... Be respectful. Dress nice...” She motions to him. “Open her car door— well, every door— and make sure you pay the bill, and did you... did you buy flowers? I think— what?”

Sam’s eyes flicker with something dull. Disappointment, maybe, and when he realizes she’s noticed he pulls back and hides it. 

“Eileen’s not that kinda chick, Mom,” Dean chimes in just as Sam is opening his mouth to respond. 

“Not the… most polite way to say it,” Sam amends without bothering to conceal his eye roll. 

Dean drops a pizza box on the table. “They have an  _ arrangement,”  _ He explains to Mary. 

Sam’s jaw tightens, and he glances up at the ceiling to gather himself. He lets out a loud breath, then looks back at Mary. “She’d be offended if she thought  _ I _ thought she couldn’t, y’know, pay for her own food, or open her own doors.” 

“Oh.” She swallows. “Okay.”

It turns out that Eileen is the ‘kind of chick’ who commands a room without meaning to. She knocks, but doesn’t wait for anyone to answer the door before she enters the bunker. She leans over the railing and waves down at them before she makes her way down the spiral staircase. She wears flannels, too, and boot cut jeans. She greets Dean with a high five before giving Sam a hug. 

Dean holds the pizza box up to her, signals something with his hands, but she shakes her head. 

“We’re getting dinner,” She says. She turns her attention to Mary, and her eyebrows pull together.

“Uh—” Sam steps between them, faces them both, but only looks at Eileen. “Eileen, this is my mom. Mary…” He pauses to spell the name out with his fingers— and Mary recognizes sign language. “Mom, this is Eileen.” Eileen looks between them, appraises Sam with a squint. “It’s a long story,” He says, almost signs but he falters. She pinches her fingers together in a sweeping motion, then turns to Mary. Behind her, Sam repeats the motion to himself. 

Mother Mary would go in for the hug, but this Mary accepts the handshake, firm and warm. 

“It’s nice to meet you,” She says, and Mary nods. 

“You too.” Mary pauses. “Or, should I—”

“I can read your lips,” Eileen assures. “Sam doesn’t need to interpret.” Then she adds, “He’s not very good at it, anyway.” 

Dean laughs. Sam’s face crinkles. He looks betrayed. 

“Not to be rude,” Sam says when Eileen’s turned back to him. “But our reservations are for seven.” 

“Yeah, alright. You crazy kids don’t stay out too late!” Dean calls, voice muffled by half a slice of pizza. It’s a joke, but it still sends a jolt of jealousy through Mary’s veins. (It should be her saying that, and Sam should be sixteen and advocating for a later curfew—) Then Dean looks at Mary and says, “Don’t worry, Sam doesn’t put out on the first ten dates.”

Mary has enough mind to be horrified by the statement, but when she looks for Eileen’s reaction, she finds her laughing. 

Sam glances urgently between Mary and Dean. Eyes bulging out of his head, he makes a face he stole from his father. “Dude.”

Behind his back, Eileen signs something, and Dean chokes a laugh. Sam looks back at her, accusing, but she holds her hands behind her back and smiles innocently up at him. She waves, and winks when Sam turns back around. 

“Goodbye, Dean.”

“Seeya!” 

“It was nice to meet you, Mary.”

They go back up the staircase, Eileen first, and when she opens the door she holds it open until Sam has already stepped through.

“What about you?” Mary asks when the bunker door has closed behind Sam and Eileen. She sits down across from Dean and leans over the table to tap his feet where they’re sitting on top of Switzerland. He glances at his feet, then at her, and sheepishly takes them off the table.

“What about me?”

“What’s going on dating-wise? You got a crush on anyone?” 

Dean slides the pizza box to Mary. 

“I’m not a teenage girl. I don’t have crushes.” 

“C’mon,” Mary urges. “What have I missed?” 

Dean’s shoulders droop, he waves a hand in the air. “Not much,” He says, defeated. “Sam’s the one with girlfriends, I just…” He doesn’t finish the sentence, thank God. Mary’s not sure how well she could handle hearing her son say that he prefers sleeping around to good old-fashioned dating. “I haven’t had time for that kind of stuff in a while.” 

“How long’s a while?” 

Dean takes a pointed bite of his pizza. 

Dean has rules, too, but Mary can’t quite figure out what they are. Unlike Mary, he has no before and after, just different masks. 

There’s the mask he wears on hunts, she’s seen that, biting and brutal. He burns bodies without question. He’s good at it, she can recognize that through the twist in her gut. She wishes he weren’t, wishes it like a prayer, but the Something— God, she knows now,  _ Chuck— _ doesn’t grant it. 

The Dean in the car, one arm resting out the open window— That Dean listens to music in a format Mary, blessedly, recognizes. He looks at Mary, dazed, when she reaches for the volume knob and turns it up. This Dean is goofy when permitted, when the long strip of road gives way to boredom to chatter. When the mood shifts, he turns the radio up and watches the road with laser focus. 

The biggest rule seems to be sharp and unwavering: don’t talk about it. Whatever it is that makes him avert his eyes if he looks at Mary too long; whatever it is that makes him go back for more beer; whatever unique expression it is that crosses his face when someone brings up Cas— don’t talk about it. 

So they don’t. They eat their pizza, drink their beer, and Dean tells Mary a story about a haunted painting in New York. 

—

Mary closes the journal and stares at the worn leather cover until her vision stops swimming. It  _ is _ swimming, colors and words and dates swallow her vision. 

The cars in the bunker garage are even older than Mary is. It’s a relief. She recognizes this technology. She leaves a note on the kitchen table, then sneaks out before anyone else wakes up. 

The drive to Lawrence is long and quiet. The radio’s old and barely holds a signal, so she rolls the window down and listens to the wind instead of static.

She tries not to think about it. But, purple elephants. She thinks about it anyway. 

John’s journal felt like reading a notation of her worst nightmares. 

Every motel she passes, she imagines her little boys behind every closed door, alone and bored with nothing but a single shotgun to protect them from any horror— supernatural or not— that awaits them. 

Their lives had been made up of vacancy signs. 

No matter how loud she turns up the radio, she hears,  _ We don’t have a home until we find out what killed your mother.  _

She makes a turn a little too sharp. The car’s passenger wheel scrapes against the curb. 

Dean had seen his father kill a monster when he was just four years old. A bullet to the head, execution-style. 

He’d held his first gun when he was six, fired it with his chubby little hands. He’d had— what did John call it—  _ a killer instinct.  _ Her baby boy. 

Eight years old,  _ I’ve told him his brother’s life is in his hands, Mary.  _

_ But sons have to be soldiers, and soldiers adapt. _

Sammy, seven, shooting a deer to protect Dean because the things you shoot, the things you kill, are evil. Because seven year olds can’t differentiate between different ends of a weapon. 

Sammy, eleven, wanting to play soccer and go to school and being shot down because soccer doesn’t kill monsters. Because  _ we owe Mary too much to give up now.  _

She thinks hard enough about her name being synonymous with vengeance that she has to pull over and lean out the open car door. The morning breeze whips at her face.

Dean and his guns and a solo hunt on his seventeenth birthday.

Sammy and his bad dreams, getting into an ivy league and being called  _ too soft.  _

Little kids with too much responsibility, covered in blood and guilt, armed with weapons and each other.

All for her. All  _ because  _ of her.

Mary throws up her dinner, rests her hands on her knees for a few seconds, then leans back into the car and starts driving.

The house is different, of course it is. A fire and thirty years later, it stands on different bones. 

She isn’t sure what she expected. Some kind of revelation, or the memory of being a ghost, but all she gets is a view of blooming rose bushes and a lawn greener than she and John had ever managed. There are children standing on a street corner with their backpacks and lunchboxes, eyes still blurry with sleep. 

She keeps driving.

There’s no grave to visit him at, so she pulls up to one of their old haunts instead. It’s a divot in the forest where they’d take John’s old truck when Mary still lived at home. Technically, it’s private property, but it’s far enough back from both the road and the open stretch of farmland that they never did get caught. 

She maneuvers carefully into the clearing then gets out of the car. 

The heels of her boots sink into the wet ground. Somewhere off in the distance, a mourning dove cries. 

A scream rips from Mary’s throat. 

It feels good, so she does it again. She grabs a fallen branch and takes it to the thick trunk of a tree until it shatters. Picks up another one and starts over. 

She ignores the wood splintering into her palm and the burn in her arms. The sound of wood hitting wood wood bounces around the treeline and her head. It pounds. Aches. She collapses to the ground when her legs can’t hold her up anymore.

When it stops echoing, and Mary’s chest has stopped heaving, she sits in the silence. 

She says, “They were kids. They were babies. I made that deal, I’ll take that blame, but I would  _ never… _ ” She exhales, long and hard until her lungs ache. “Kids aren’t supposed to know about ghosts. You’re supposed to tell them they aren’t real even if you have to put salt lines in front of the windows.You don’t give them a  _ gun! _

“I read your journal.” She punctuates her point by holding it out, accusingly, like a priest holds a cross. “Everything you said about me… about Sam and Dean. Was I ever… Were any of us real people to you? The amount of pressure you put on them— You spent so long chasing bullshit and telling lies and now my sons can’t even look at me. I can’t…

“Who was it for?” She asks needlessly. It comes out as a whimper. “The revenge, and the moving. It wasn’t for me. The demon’s dead, it didn’t bring me back.” She sniffles, suddenly aware of the tears on her cheeks. She wipes them away childishly with the back of her wrist. “My babies have been to Hell. How do you live with yourself?”

She rests her head back against the tree trunk and stares up at the canopy of linking tree branches. 

“How am I supposed to live with myself?”

The only response is the cooing doves. 

—

She cleans herself up in a Gas-‘n’-Sip bathroom before she gets back to the bunker. She washes her face with cold water and knocks the mud off her boots, and when she gets back it’s with a bag full of beef jerky and a mouthful of excuses. 

—

The Impala had been a handsome betrayal. 

John had pulled up to the house in her, with her sharp edges and roaring engine even as she idled. 

There was no room in it for car seats— there weren’t even any seatbelts, but Mary was taken by her all the same. She’d been annoyed at first, he was supposed to get a  _ family  _ car, but John had slid across the bench, patted the driver’s seat, and said, “C’mon, give her a whirl.”

Mary kissed the gas pedal and she purred. They took her out to an old dirt road, empty acres on either side, and let her run.

They never did exchange it for a van. 

That was then. 

She finds a toy— one of those old army men— jammed into the ashtray in the back seat. There are initials carved into the door. Dean excuses a rattle in the air vents with, “She does that sometimes. Got something stuck in her a while ago.” 

The car makes new noises now, ones she can’t identify. The bench isn’t pushed up far enough for her to reach the pedals. This is someone else’s car, it belongs to some family she never got to be a part of.

Dean guards the keys in his jacket pocket, barely even tosses them to Sam, and never to Cas. Mary could ask, but she isn’t sure what she’d do if the answer was no. 

There’s only one relic of her old life remaining, and she can’t handle being told it doesn’t belong to her.

She lays back on the hood instead and stares up at the garage ceiling. 

The two weeks she’s been alive have been ceaselessly packed, and now the free time has avalanched. The revelations come to suffocate her.

The Men of Letters are real, and they’re dicks.

Angels are real, and they’re dicks, too, and one of them practically lives in her sons’ house— which happens to be an Interwar Period bunker that feels about as much like a home as a hospital does. 

God’s a guy named Chuck, and he has a sister. Computers don’t just fit in one room, they fit in her pocket. 

Her sons are grown, and they’re hunters, and this is the first real home they’ve had. They weren’t just raised the same way she was, they were raised worse, without the guise of normalcy she’d managed to wrack up running between school dances and ghost hunts.

Sam had college, then he didn’t, but no one will go into the specifics of him dropping out. 

They’ve both been to Hell. They sleep with guns under their pillows. Dean remembers her as a distant memory, and Sam knows mothers as kindling.

Her name is Mary Winchester. She was dead, now she isn’t. Her car isn’t her car, her boys aren’t boys, and music sucks now.

—

Mary walks past Sam’s door three times before she works up the courage to knock. 

He cranes his head around from where he’s hunched over his desk— he should sit up straight, he’s going to mess up his back— and nods at her. 

“Hey— what’s up?” 

Mary holds up her open laptop helplessly. “I can’t find the YouTube on here.” 

Sam’s lips twitch, he breathes something of a laugh, then holds his hands out for the computer. 

He pushes the book he was reading to the side, and puts it on the desk. Mary stands behind him and looks over his shoulder. 

“YouTube is a website,” He explains as he clicks a circular rainbow icon on the top right corner of the screen. “So you have to go to Chrome.”

“Chrome,” Mary repeats under her breath. 

“Then you go up here and type ‘YouTube.com.’ Then click enter and you’ll be...” He pauses while it loads. A frankly overwhelming webpage shows up, with more titled squares than Mary can count. “Here.” 

Sam turns, takes in Mary’s blank stare. 

“Okay, uh— we’ll make it easier. What are you looking for?” 

“Dean said this website could teach me sign language.”

Sam pauses. Blinks, then nods. “Yeah, we can— I can find you some videos that teach the basics.” 

He turns back to the computer, types something, then stops. “If you don’t mind me asking...”

“I’m getting lunch with Eileen this weekend,” Mary says, trying not to look bashful about it, even as she keeps her eyes on the blinking line after the letters ASL. “I thought it would be nice to, y’know, learn some.” 

“You are?” 

Mary winces and pulls her eyes away from the computer screen. “Is that okay? I don’t want to overstep, but she gave me her number, and—“

“It’s fine,” Sam says quickly. “It is! It’s nice.” He glances down at his keyboard and smiles, fondly. “It’s really, really nice. I’m glad you’re getting to know her. I, uh. I really like her.” 

While Sam scrolls, Mary considers asking him about all the girlfriends she never got to meet. 

Something stops her.

Sam has rules, but not nearly as many. They’re centered around behavior, not projection. Eat less red meat, exercise every day, make enough coffee for everyone and try not to drink it all before they wake up. 

There are things he doesn’t talk about, subjects he changes before they can come to fruition. When Mary mentions Stanford, he gets quiet. When she presses about her deal, about the demon that killed her, he skirts around the revenge.

  
One of Sam’s rules is to not make people feel bad, so the wounds that Mary prods at must inevitably link back to her. She wants to ask, to pry the hinges off the doors he’s putting up. She doesn’t. She knows how sacred rules can be.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Kudos and comments are always appreciated. You can also feel free to come talk to me on Tumblr [ @queenofmoons](https://queenofmoons.tumblr.com/)


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